innovation playground Idris Mootee

Millennials Are Disrupting Media Again. Media Companies Now Need To Play Catch-up.

Digital disruption to the media began early in the days of the Internet throwing every media company into a crisis mode. Now this is happening again - this time, even homepage viewership is on the decline. I am not saying this is the death of the webpage, having a webpage or content site is simply not enough.  Content is now distributed and stories are best shared and read through new platforms such as Facebook’s Instant Articles, Apple News, Buzzfeed, the Starbucks mobile app or through Reddit, a bulletin board platform that doesn’t sound like something new since the early days of the Internet. It is an entertainment, social network, and news website where registered community members can submit content, such as text posts or direct links, making it essentially a crowd sourced news channel.

Today all Millennials are gravitating to social networks and news media sites and assume everything is free. This generation, (confident, always connected, ramen-eating, ultra short attention span, impecunious, underemployed, some over-educated, gaming obsessed, and so forth) millennials are not only the largest generation in US and world history, they’re on the cusp of commanding the largest influence and voice of our consumer culture. They expect technology to work and simply-work and if it doesn’t, you will have a big problem. They are tech-loving consumers but have unrealistic expectations that technology needs to be seamless (thanks to Apple) with a new standard of intuitiveness. They align themselves with the latest technology and will try anything new and cool and quick to critic and quick to find workaround. Computers don't crash and smart phones should be able to handle everything.

Millennials don’t watch TV (and others are following) and they sleep with their cell phones next to them perhaps 9 out of 10. Probably 10 out of 10 have no landlines and no interest in watching TV. Smartphone is the most important tool in their lives and when people are saying the smartphone is becoming a commodity. It is not. How can it be when it is the most important tool or digital companion? Smartphones are not doing well because the expectation is rising and Smartphones have replaced the cigarette (good thing) as things to do in those odd moments, lonely moments or simply filling up every minute of downtime. It is replacing newspaper, cigarette, chewing gum, calculator, wallet and many other tools…. hookups, meet-ups or start-ups. 

There is no online or offline, social is social and other opinions matter. They get along well with their parents and even have friendship with parents, which didn’t happen in the older generation.  They actually influence what products their parents buy, what apps their parents use and where to travel. They have a  “we can fix it together” mindset and “we can change it all” attitude. That’s why they love working for start-ups and game changing companies with a purpose.

More millennials than non-millennials integrate their beliefs and causes into their choice of companies to support, their purchases, and their day-to-day interactions. They put the money where the mouth is. Millennials also care about what’s genuine and authentic. They are looking for somewhere between a retro aesthetic and a search for honesty and authenticity.  Something advertisers are still struggling with. For many millennials, they prefer to climb the Himalayas then corporate ladder. They are raised to believe they can do whatever they want and they are hitting the realities as they enter the society.  Millennials are hard to catch. Media companies are not getting it. You need to work harder.

 

 

When We Look Back After Ten Years From Now, We Will Call This A Facebook Decade For Sure.

Maria Jesus Galan, a nun who has spent 35 years with the Santo Domingo el Rea convent in Toledo, Spain has been spending a lot of time on Facebook and digitizing the Dominican convent's archives.

When the local government gave her a prize for her hard work and she has over 600 Facebook friends, but she is not making any friends in the convent. Some nuns reportedly claimed that Sister Maria's Facebook activity "made life impossible" for them. So she was therefore asked to leave the convent and now back to live with her mom. There are still so many who are afraid of technology, not just the crazy leaders of Iran or Libya.

Today the keyboard is mightier than the sword. It bought down Tunisia and then Egypt and not sure who is next? Libya? They wish there is a kill switch but even there is one there is still no use. There are always channel for information to leak and eventually you cannot shut down the world’s Internet and mobile networks.

The Egypt case has proved the power of social network. It sparked biggest challenge to the regimes that are not democratically elected but also to corporations and brands. Twitter played a less important role this time, but it is till part of the social networks that power up revolution.

Called it "Social Revolution Networks". Ideas flow back and forth in real time and momentum multiplying every second. No one can control or dictate these voices anymore, they echoed through Facebook and it is the ultimate freedom of speech. Facebook is probably the number media today, more powerful that TV for sure. But I still like my New York Times. And for Linkedin, I won’t sleep well if I am running the company. It is easy to tell your staff and investors that people want to keep their professional and personal profile separate; I think it is a false sense of security.

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner thinks many of us prefer to keep their professional online personas and their personal personas distinct. Weiner argued that while LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are often lumped together in a broad social networking category, all three represent separate social platforms that serve different needs for people. Well, yes and no. I think linked in missed a lot of opportunities to go beyond what they do and the interface is pretty bad. They can use a lot of help.

Here is a big idea. The next big magazine should be entirely Facebook based. There will be a print version but online context is entirely available through a FB app. The stories gathered all the feedback and perspectives from the users and fully incorporated into the content.

I have one more killer feature to make this work……. but I will keep it to myself as I think I have a buyer for that idea. Think about it this way, FB reminds us that everything in this world is organized around people. Somehow people forget that. If we rethink our business and organize them around people, I think we can come up plenty of new ideas to leap forward. Businesses are transforming how they relate to people and operate. CMOs that can throw away their notion of mass media and start recognizing and embracing this shift will gain strategic advantage over competitors. I think this is the new theory of marketing, time to write a new book. But I don’t have time.

A man in Egypt wanted to express his gratitude about the victories the youth of 25th of January have achieved and chose to name his firstborn girl "Facebook" Jamal Ibrahim, The girl’s family and friends gathered around the new born to express their continuing support for the revolution that started on Facebook. Facebook hold a special place in Egyptians' hearts because of its role in the revolution. I don't know anyone named their sons or daughter Twitters or Linkedin or Skype. Do you?

Apple Should Forget The Movie Studios. Go After The Banks Instead. I Want My iMoney.

This sign is up for our San Francisco office. The archtiects and the girls are working day and night to get this right and a lot of furniture are still in the Atlantic Ocean. Shipping furniture from Europe to US is always slow. Hey we need to get the righ stuff we need to wait.

Congrats to Nick Hughes (managing director of Signal Point Partners and LBS alum) for picking up the Social and Economic award at the Economist Innovation Awards a few weeks ago held at the Science Museum in London. Nick was recognized for his part in creating the M-Pesa venture in Kenya, a mobile money-transfer initiative – something that is long overdue in the world of banking unmet needs.

M-Pesa was first launched in 2005, allow people to transfer money, pay bills and save using a mobile phone, without NO bank account. Handset to handset money transfer, you would wonder why we don’t have it here. Now it is widely adoption in different parts of Africa with over 12 million users in Kenya alone. I see this is more than a technology innovation; it is a social innovation to facilitate economic development in the developing world.

Today, it still takes weeks to clear a check, transferring money is still a pain and fees are hefty. It is time for disruptive change. PayPay was great; never really get beyond the web. It should have been Twitter Wallet or Facebook Money that we are using now. Twitpay is one of those; the service has only 15,000 users to date. They are not the only one trying to attack the payment ecosystem, seeking out ways small and large to tear down the fortress the banks and credit card companies have built to defend their businesses.

PayPal is trying to harness the creative powers of the open Innovation to rethink payments. ClickandBuy's Facebook application allows Facebook users will be able to easily execute money transfers among each other and purchase Facebook apps quickly and conveniently. Another one called Square, a new company founded by Twitter cocreator Jack Dorsey, lets anyone accept physical credit card payments through a smartphone or computer by plugging in a free sugar-cube-sized device — no expensive card reader required. I don’t know why Google is not attacking this seriously, big markets and big money. I guess that’s the problem with bottom-up innovation and efforts are not aligned with opportunities.

And I'd rather using Apple i-Money and use i-Tunes to manage my banking. Steve, forget the movie studios..go for the banks!!!! I am looking forward to getting rid of my wallet…so I have more rooms for gadgets.

Off to San Francisco for IC Innovation Masterclass and BTW our street sign is up. Competitors alerted and we are in game. Magazine gone to the printer. New staff starting this week. Partnerships discussions with a few firms. Busy week and now looking forward to catch up with my couple of dozens of frineds in the Bay area.

Who's Twittering You? The Big Ben, Great Wall Of China Or The Pyramids Of Egypt?

I read somewhere that Big Ben can now twitter you for the time and guess how many people signed up? Over 50,000 and I guess there are lot of people don’t trust their watches. The Great Wall of China will soon be sending you messages saying how many people were up there in any given day or the US federal government sending you at a given time how big the deficit is and how much it is costing you as a tax payer or how much debt every new born baby has. Or North Korean government to use Twitter to announce how many soldiers or missiles they have at one given time.

White House was using Twitter to keep the momentum going and keeping track of which Democratic lawmakers had changed their minds and decided to vote in favor of the bill. That’s a creative use. Politicians fully understand the power of Twitter's ability mobilize grassroots support for their legislative agendas.

With the advances in a host of technologies like RFID and NFC, a lot of smart interactions and data can now be transmitted anywhere with minimal integration. There are some interesting experiments like BakerTweet, a system made by UK. agency Poke that allows bakers to dynamically send out tweets to customers alerting them when a fresh batch of buns coming out from the oven. Not sure how valuable this is.

We can expect to see many interesting use in the next 12 months. Any physical objects could become a real-time visualization tool for anything.   A company called Violet, which makes Mirror, an RFID reader USB-attached mirror that enables any computer to react to the presence of an object. he Mirror’ is one of the coolest gadgets I’ve seen in a long time. Hook the $60 plate up to your Mac and get ready to read some RFID tags. The set includes Ztamps (basically RFID tags) that you can stick on objects and assign actions.

For instance, say you attach one to a toy car. When you put the toy car on top of the The Mirror by Violet, it could open up your browser for you to read your favorite car blogs. There can be so many creative applications, there are the three that I can think of such as tagging of your computer’s mouse so when it is placed on certain spot on your desk it will trigger an application, like playing Monopoly.  an example would be placing the mouse on a particular spot will inform your company to activate your Skype to talk to you buddy. Or tagging your car keys can trigger your G-mail account. Tagging your afternoon tea cup will activate your PC to launch a browser with your favorite Power Point deck. Can you think of more?

Is Facebook And Twitter Bad For Your Brain? Or It Acutally Makes You A Better Person?

Here is an old vision of a high-tech future. It is old magazine illustration in 1969 a Japanese Sunday magazine, which show life in the future, pervaded by computers. This illustration “The Rise of the Computerized School,” by Shigeru Komatsuzaki is an illustrated scenario of what schools will be like in the future. Sort of Webex type of online delivery and interactive learning via a tablet.

I always find it fascinating to go back to see the future, comics and movies are the best place to see the future. In those worlds, there are always concern of the computer taking over of the Big Brother is controlling everything. Funny I’ve never seen an illustration, comic of movie that have anything similar to the Facebook or Twitter of the world. I guess it is never easy imagining the future. There are things we simply cannot imagine. With kids and grown-ups spending so much time in the social networking world, we never really understand the full implications on us. Twitter is everywhere. And yes, Twitter is coming to the X-box.

Does Facebook make us better persons or more sociable? And the idea that our most of our private lives are now semi-public, at least to our friends. Everyone knows what I was doing this weekend, good thing or bad thing? With camera phone being a standard feature, with the tap of a screen your life story is now shared by tens of thousands of people, some you know and some you don’t. Your thoughts and feelings are broadcasted to the world; I’m talking about the immediacy and accessibility of Twittermessages that make private conversations public. The space between public and private are dangerously blurred.

What about kids? Neuroscientist warns that social networks harm children’s brains. He suggests that sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Bebo are said to shorten attention spans, encourage instant gratification and make young people more self-centered. The claims from neuroscientist Susan Greenfield will make disturbing reading for the millions whose social lives depend on the stream of messages coming in everyday. I don't think it is just young people, we all have Blackberry or iPhone addictions. I am always constantly my Blackberry just to see if I've missed anything from the 83 groups that I joined. I called it staying in touch.

Baroness Greenfield, an Oxford University neuroscientist and director of the Royal Institution, believes repeated exposure could effectively 'rewire' the brain. Computer games and fast-paced TV shows were also a factor, she said. We know how small babies need constant reassurance that they exist. My fear is that these technologies are infantilizing the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment.' I don’t’ buy it. I would argue it allows kids to adapt to the fast moving world of data overload and learn to make fast decisions based on multiple sources of data feeding to them. It is like training a fighter pilot when one is 16, it is a lot easier as they can handle all input and perform real-time sense-making.

Having said that, I strongly urge readers not to check your Facebook or Twitter during a bath. And if for whatever reasons you do, don't be like this 17-year-old Romanian girl and risk your well-being to Tweet. Maria Barbu was, in fact, in the tub while using Twitter when she likely reached to plug in her charger with a wet hand, electrocuting herself in the process. It is called Twittercide. Yes, social networking can be dangerous.

Michael Jackson's Death Is Tragic. It Reminds Us Of How Fragile We Are, Both As Human Beings And The Things We Created - The Internet.

The web today is filled with Tweets on the tragic death of Michael Jackson. The first company that benefited from this tragic event was Apple. The iTunes Music Store and 9 out of the 10 top albums are all Michael Jackson’s.  And top 5 selling DVDs in Amazon all Jackson’s too. Michael is iconic across generations. Music fans around the world have a deep-rooted connection with this iconic star and his music. And people are quick to try to make money from this. This Neverland Ranch domain name is selling for $20mm on eBay. Why? The seller is suggesting that there is talk of that the Neverland Ranch will be be tnred in a money making thinng bigger than Graceland as an amusement park.

Music is like air we breathe and iPod is the first electronic gadget that every kid grows up with.  Does music helps us to become more ‘us’ as ‘individual’ or it is causing more conformity? Does Michael Jackson’s music scream loud the language of individuality? What causes the cultural conflict with the problems of identity and identification. Our society possesses culture of our own; varying with diverse ethnic and education etc. and at the same time conditioned by popular cultures such as music and TV, and now social media.

The notion of identification and identity, two concepts which frequently appear in connection with the individual's personality development and they are now reflected in our images or avartars on Facebook and other social networks.  The terms identity and identification and implies some key differences; namely that a person's image or identity of himself/herself is obtained early in life as the result of selecting desired traits from various models and that an individual must have a concise concept of himself in order to survive as a productive human being.  Sometimes these two create conflicts.

Michael’ story of his fall was so profound, from a superstar into a financial, physical and psychological. People wonder how that could happened to a talented person and why?  Many belief that Jackson had body dysmorphic disorder, where the sufferer has a distorted self-image and identify crisis. It is very sad. But it is not that uncommon, I see people in the workplace who are unable to obtain meaningful, purposeful identities; and therefore a real "identity crisis" occurs. There are some indications that the younger generation will rely less and less on TV for cultural refinement of an individual. The emergence of social networks and media hopefully will become a medium for them to shape their own identities and prevent crisis.

What’s an identity crisis? The identity of an individual incorporates culture and cultural values. If the culture and the cultural values are unclear to the individual ("culture conflict"), then the result will be faulty identity formation or "identity crisis". Constantly confused and trying to be someone else.

This tragic event shows us again how fragile we are, both as human beings and the things we created-the Internet. Twitter was even temporarily jammed into inaccessibility, and story-breaker TMZ went down as fans around the world tried to find out what was happening.

According to data from Akamai worldwide Internet traffic was 11% higher than normal during the peak hours between 3 p.m. PDT and 4 p.m., when news of Jackson's death was breaking. That traffic forced even Google to its knees for a brief period of time Thursday afternoon. That won’t happen with radio or TV when the world tuned in to see a man landed on the moon. Networking problems will only get worse as traffic grows and our demand for real-time and more new Twitter-like apps.

May he rest in peace.

Building On The 140 Platform. What's Will Twitter Do Next? Twitter TV Or Twitter Dating?

Twitter is touching more people than NYT or WSJ (ok it may not be a fair comparison) Add to the fact that a lot of Twitter users rarely hit the hyper-text-transferred-to-the-browser page, but rather use through a desktop and/or mobile app, and the figure gets even more impressive. Twitter is continuing its unstoppable move forward. And what about those Twitter traffic "machines" and “buy your follower” programs? Twitter needs to figure this out as soon as possible. Twitter litter? Perhaps a payment/filter model will eventually work, weeds out the hackers that wont pay $5/month for access to Twitter that has real people and conversations happening. We are also seeing Twitter viruses starting to happening. Anti-virus for Tweeter?

The 140 number is doing magic, at least for them.  How did they get this magic number?  I was reading Patrick Glinski’s paper on Twitter Strategy (part of a series of Social Media Knowledge white paper that we are publishing), it is a very good piece. There’s so much hype abut Tweeter and you can’t imagine how many times Twitter is mentioned when I'm watching CNN news, the news anchor are actively promoting their tweets. TV is not enough?

I’ve had probably more than a hundred requests for Tweeters but I still have not jumped into the bandwagon. Sorry I must have disappointed many.  I just struggle to write in less than 140 characters. I need at least 486 characters in order to say something meaningful.  So I have a problem. Think about it this way, most people who twit are men (no formal statistic, just my guess) because most men are comfortable in communicating in less than 140 characters or less. We have fewer words in our vocabulary and usually say things short and sweet. On the other had, women's verbal capacity is far bigger than men. Women are better in communication in general and don’t usually get to the point fast. So the next big idea may be 300 words Twitter for women?

Can we milk this 140 idea? I just wonder what happen if we limit our everyday conversation to 140 characters per message? What about a social network that only allows 140 connections and your friends need to compete or stay active to remain in your network?  What about your wireless carrier sending you your month statement in 140 characters? I hate reading these monthly statements as they can’t even design one that people can understand. Go hire a usability person!  How about Twitter TV? These 140 seconds show? What about Twitter music? This one is cool.. Twitter Dating! 140 persons you can meet in 140 days?

Twitter TV is real, they have teamed with Reveille productions and Brillstein Entertainment Partners to develop an unscripted series based on the site, which invites 140-character postings from members around the world. The show would harness Twitter to put players on the trail of celebrities in an interactive, competitive format. The producers call their proposed series the first to bring the immediacy of Twitter to the TV screen.